Herbert Marcuse 1898 – 1979

Herbert Marcuse was a 20th-century German-American philosopher and a leading figure of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, particularly in its American period. His major works including Reason and Revolution, Eros and Civilization, and One-Dimensional Man (1964) developed a synthesis of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis to analyse the integration of dissent and the deadening of critical thought in advanced industrial societies. His writings were widely read by the New Left and the student movements of the 1960s, earning him the informal title of father of the New Left. He emigrated from Germany in 1933 with the rise of the Nazi regime and held positions at Brandeis University and the University of California, San Diego. His critical theory of advanced capitalism remains one of the most ambitious of the post-war era.

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a German-American philosopher and central figure of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin to an assimilated Jewish family, he served in the German army at the end of World War I, joined the Institute for Social Research in 1933, and emigrated with the Institute first to Geneva and then to New York and California in 1934. He held positions at Brandeis and the University of California San Diego after the war.

Marcuse's major philosophical works combine Hegelian and Marxist categories with Freudian psychoanalysis. Reason and Revolution (1941) defended Hegel's philosophical contribution against the charge that German Idealism led to Nazism. Eros and Civilization (1955) developed a synthesis of Marx and Freud that grounded radical politics in the analysis of repression. One-Dimensional Man (1964) — Marcuse's most influential single book — argued that advanced industrial society absorbs and neutralizes opposition by managing needs, integrating the working class, and producing a flattened consciousness incapable of imagining alternatives.

Marcuse became a major intellectual figure of the 1960s New Left in the United States and Europe; the German Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund regarded him as one of its three Ms (alongside Marx and Mao). His An Essay on Liberation (1969) and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) responded to the late-1960s political moment. He continued teaching and writing until his death in Starnberg in 1979.